After Bloomberg

What kind of city is the Mayor leaving to his successor?

His job, the Mayor said, is to “say no.” It’s not easy “when people scream at you at a parade, give you the finger, criticize you in the paper.”

Photograph by Pari Dukovic

Michael Bloomberg, whose third and final term as mayor of New York expires at midnight on December 31st, keeps a digital clock running in reverse in his City Hall office, counting down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds left in his term. He remains one of the wealthiest men in the city—his fortune is estimated at twenty-seven billion dollars—but this seems of limited comfort to him. In 2008 and 2012, he considered running for President, as a moderate Republican or as a self-financed third-party candidate, but he was eventually persuaded that he couldn’t win. Now he is clearly vexed by the challenges of envisaging his own future and a City Hall without him.

Bloomberg is seventy-one and conspicuously vigorous. He does not intend to retire. Yet he has told friends that he does not know what he will do next. “I can tell you what I want to do,” he said to me in late July. We sat at a tiny conference table in a cavernous office on the second floor of City Hall, which he shares with fifty members of his staff. He had taken off his charcoal suit jacket. “I haven’t had a vacation in twelve years,” he said. He imagined a week of skiing and a week of golf. “After that, I’d go ballistic.”

Bloomberg does not plan to return to running his business, Bloomberg L.P. Kevin Sheekey, who has been one of the Mayor’s top political strategists for the past twelve years, said that he expects Bloomberg to go through a sort of “re-start,” as he did when he left Wall Street, in 1981, and when he entered politics, in 2001.

Bloomberg has pledged to give away most of his fortune before he dies. That effort is under way. In 2011, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reported, Bloomberg donated more money to charity than all but four other Americans: Margaret A. Cargill, William S. Dietrich II, Paul Allen, and George Soros. He has a foundation, which every year gives away several hundred million dollars to a range of causes, with an emphasis on public health, government innovation, the environment, education, and the arts. The foundation has pledged a hundred million dollars to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative; six hundred million to combat smoking overseas; fifty million to support family planning; and another fifty million to the Sierra Club’s drive to reduce the nation’s reliance on coal plants. Bloomberg himself has reportedly given three million dollars to help establish Mayors Against Illegal Guns—one of many contributions he has made to advance gun-control laws—and $1.1 billion to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University. Nevertheless, he said, “I don’t see myself as a full-time philanthropist.”

He also has invested in politicians outside New York. In July, he hosted fund-raisers for Mayor Cory Booker, of Newark, who last week won the Democratic nomination for U.S. senator from New Jersey, and Senator Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, who is running for reëlection. He has endorsed the bid by William Daley, President Obama’s former chief of staff, to unseat the Democratic governor of Illinois, and has spent considerable sums to try to defeat several Democratic and Republican senators and congressmen who have opposed gun control. Critics from both parties have complained about what they see as Bloomberg’s desire to become the nanny to citizens of other states. When Democratic Party leaders caution Bloomberg that defeating pro-gun Democrats might only result in wins for Republican allies of the National Rifle Association, he is unmoved. “You can’t have it both ways,” he said. “If you want to push an agenda that tries to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and people with psychiatric problems, the political party shouldn’t matter.”

I asked Bloomberg if he could imagine joining the President’s Cabinet. In theory, he said, “it would be fascinating to be Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, jobs like that. Secretary of the Treasury, you want someone who’s a real economist”—and someone “who is maybe less opinionated.” Bloomberg thinks of himself as a team player, as long as it’s his team.

It is hard to imagine the endeavor that would sufficiently command Bloomberg’s restless ambition and vanity. He is an outsized character: the biggest plutocrat in a plutocratic capital, a creature of Wall Street who, flagrantly and legally, tapped his limitless bank account to become, and remain, mayor. Seeking a third term required him to ask the City Council to amend the City Charter on his behalf, about which he is unapologetic. “I can tell you that when it came to a third term the City Council majority thought it was good to change” the charter, he said. “And the public elected me.”

In private and in his natural social milieu, in the town houses and penthouses of the Upper East Side and Central Park West, Bloomberg is voluble, self-absorbed, brilliant. At dinner parties, while drinking copious amounts of wine, he makes plain his contempt for the New York Times, the media property friends say that he covets but most likely cannot own, and for President Obama, who occupies the office he craves but will never achieve.

“I am sympathetic that he has a Congress that is partisan,” Bloomberg told me, speaking of Obama. “In the past two hundred and thirty-five years, we’ve probably had lots of partisan Congresses. His job is to try to bring the parties together. And when he works at it he has actually done some pretty good things.” But he faults Obama for failing to invite members of Congress to join him on his regular rounds of golf, for instance, and for delegating to Congress the drafting of important regulatory legislation, such as the Dodd-Frank bill and the health-care law. “His job is to lead,” Bloomberg said. “He is the Chief Executive. It’s a separate but not an equal branch of government.”

Bloomberg has no complaints about his own leadership. He told me that he would like to be remembered as a mayor who brought the city “efficient, honest government that is responsive to the needs of the people, without worrying about politics, focussing instead on the things that will make a difference in the long term.”

In early September of 2001, Bloomberg was just another struggling candidate for mayor. A former Wall Street trader and aspiring media mogul, he possessed sufficient wealth and self-regard to think that his executive experience qualified him to run. He couldn’t run as a Democrat: the Party was overflowing with candidates, all united in their opposition to Rudolph Giuliani, the outgoing Republican mayor, whom Bloomberg respected.

During Giuliani’s two terms in office, New York’s crime rate, which had risen steeply through the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties, went down, but his get-tough persona was wearing thin on the citizenry. The City Charter did not permit him to seek a third term, and polls suggested that, if he had, almost sixty per cent of the voters would have rejected him. Bloomberg realized that, by combining his millions with the Republican Party’s desperate desire to hold on to City Hall, he could be the Party’s savior. But, despite his financial largesse, he was an asterisk in the polls—an awkward candidate and a poor public speaker, whose view of Coney Island was from his private plane.

Then came September 11th. The city was soothed by Giuliani’s display of strength as he strode among the World Trade Center’s ruins in an “FDNY” hat; the bickering of the Democratic candidates was not reassuring. Giuliani, hailed as “America’s Mayor,” endorsed Bloomberg in millions of dollars’ worth of well-crafted TV and radio ads, helping to elevate him in the eyes of the public into a comfortingly mature businessman who could guide the city.

For the past twelve years, New York City residents have lived in a reality-distortion field created by a man who spent two hundred and sixty million dollars of his own money to get elected three times, and who expresses disdain for interest groups, which he can afford to ignore. Bars and businesses have carped about his smoking ban. Public-employee unions have denounced him as a robber baron. Anti-poverty organizers have assailed his budget cuts. Civil-liberties groups, the Times editorial page, and most Democratic candidates for mayor criticize him for allowing police officers to engage in racial profiling; last week, a federal judge ruled that the city’s stop-and-frisk tactics were unconstitutional. But the job of mayor, Bloomberg told me, is to “say no.” He went on, “Everybody would like to have everything at no cost. That’s normal. That’s not the real world. It’s easy to say yes. It’s not easy to say no when people scream at you at a parade, give you the finger, criticize you in the paper.”

Daniel Doctoroff, a deputy mayor in Bloomberg’s administration from 2002 to 2008 and now the president and C.E.O. of Bloomberg L.P., said, “Mike is not afraid to be criticized, or to be wrong. He cares much less about how people think of him than anyone I’ve ever known. He’s comfortable with himself. He’s highly self-confident. Yet he doesn’t have a big ego.”

It was an odd assertion, considering the title of the Mayor’s autobiography—“Bloomberg by Bloomberg.” At times, Bloomberg has shown his disregard for people and institutions ranging from a disabled reporter who fumbled with his recording device at a press conference to the United Federation of Teachers. “If the U.F.T. wants it, it ain’t good,” he told reporters this summer. A mayor unconcerned with how he is perceived can be arrogant as well as bold. In 2008, before he formally announced that he would not run for President, he disparaged the candidates, including Obama and John McCain, in a conversation with Joyce Purnick, the author of “Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics”: “What the hell do they know about management and dealing with people? Nothing.”

Part of Bloomberg’s appeal to New Yorkers is that he is perceived as being above the grubbiness of city politics. Many Democrats and independents, especially among the upper middle class and the wealthy, are grateful for the money—more than two hundred million dollars—that he has donated to the city’s cultural and social-service organizations. They praise him as a competent manager and as a forthright, progressive, and effective national voice on public health, gun control, the environment, gay rights, abortion rights, and many other issues important to New Yorkers.

In an effort to improve public health in the city, Bloomberg not only banished smoking in public places but stepped up the monitoring of restaurants for health violations; to combat obesity, he pushed fast-food restaurants to disclose calorie counts, and moved to ban the sale of large sugary drinks. “He’s probably been the most aggressive public-health mayor in the history of the United States,” Christine Quinn, the speaker of the City Council and a leading Democratic candidate in the upcoming mayoral primary, says. Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers and one of Bloomberg’s foremost adversaries, told me, “His health policies have woken people up.” Indeed, according to a Times poll released last week, these “experiments in behavioral modification” have been “overwhelmingly embraced” by city residents. By promoting a switch to natural gas to generate electricity, Bloomberg has helped reduce the city’s carbon footprint by sixteen per cent in the past six years. He has installed bicycle lanes throughout the city and established car-free pedestrian malls in midtown Manhattan. This summer, he introduced CitiBike, a bike-sharing program that already is immensely popular. He has accelerated the opening of the waterfront in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens.

One of Bloomberg’s most enduring legacies will be his record, with his police commissioner, Ray Kelly, of combatting crime. Under Giuliani, the city’s crime rate went down; during Bloomberg’s three terms, it has fallen dramatically. Between 2001 and 2012, rapes dropped by twenty-five per cent, robberies by twenty-eight per cent, and burglaries by forty-one per cent; the murder rate fell thirty-six per cent, to a record low of four hundred and nineteen murders in 2012, down from twenty-two hundred and forty-five in 1990. Bloomberg says that he expects murders to be in “the low three hundreds” this year, half the number of the year he was elected, 2001.

Bloomberg’s contribution to education has been less definitive. Early in his tenure, he persuaded the state government to grant the mayor the power to control the public-school system; formerly, it was controlled by the Board of Education, a majority of whose members were appointed by the five borough presidents. Bloomberg named as his first chancellor Joel Klein, a former chief of the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust division, believing that Klein’s experience in battling monopolies would be useful in corralling an education system dominated by the teachers’ union.

Bloomberg closed schools that underperformed and gave space to charter schools. Teachers chafed at being blamed for poor student performance when myriad factors, including poverty and troubled families, were involved. Bloomberg boasts that, since 2005, the high-school-graduation rate has risen by thirty-nine per cent and the dropout rate has been cut in half, to eleven per cent. Critics counter that only thirty-four per cent of those who graduated in June of 2012 were considered ready for college or a job. This spring, English and math scores dropped sharply, following the introduction of more rigorous tests that were promoted by the Obama Administration and are intended to measure analytical thinking. The Mayor’s critics point to the scores as evidence that the city’s emphasis on multiple-choice answers and memorization has failed. Bloomberg, noting that city students outperformed students in major upstate cities, called the results “very good news.”

Both Bloomberg and his critics agree that he erred when it came time to replace Klein. He appointed Cathie Black, a successful magazine executive and a social acquaintance of his, who quickly became a polarizing figure. In a meeting with parents concerned about overcrowded classrooms, Black joked that one solution might be birth control. She tried to recover with another comment: making decisions about classroom space was akin to “many Sophie’s Choices,” she said, referring to the William Styron novel in which a mother is forced to choose which of her two children will die in the gas chamber at Auschwitz. After Black had spent just ninety-five days on the job, Bloomberg asked her to resign.

Bloomberg has generally been praised for his control of the city’s budget, especially during his first two terms. “He built up surpluses when times were good,” Charles Brecher, the consulting research director of the Citizens Budget Commission, which serves as a watchdog over the city’s budget, said. In 2008, as the recession struck, he added, “we had a big cushion when the shit hit the fan.” Bloomberg’s widely respected budget director, Mark Page, a career civil servant, has been in the job throughout Bloomberg’s twelve years as mayor.

But independent organizations like the Citizens Budget Commission lately have expressed concern about the city’s future fiscal health. Joseph Lhota, a former city budget director and the front-runner among the Republican candidates for mayor, faults Bloomberg for not controlling the growth of city spending. “Now, when I say this, Mike will be mad at me for the rest of my life,” he told me. “Let me choose my words carefully. . . . Spending has gone up fifty-six per cent over the rate of inflation the last eleven years.”

Doctoroff, a successful private-equity investor, shaped Bloomberg’s economic-development policies. Bloomberg got to know him in 1998, when Doctoroff led an effort to lure the 2012 Olympic Games to New York. Doctoroff had seen how the Games served as a growth catalyst for host cities—Tokyo expanded its subway system, Atlanta transformed its downtown. When Bloomberg became a candidate, in 2001, he embraced many of Doctoroff’s development suggestions.

After Bloomberg won, he persuaded Doctoroff to become deputy mayor for economic development, and for the next six years they were on a mission. The city failed to land the 2012 Olympics, but Doctoroff extolls the projects that resulted from the attempt. The site that was originally proposed to house the Olympic Village, in Queens, “is becoming the largest subsidized middle-income housing development in the city” in decades, he said. The No. 7 subway extension to the far West Side of Manhattan is under construction. Hudson Yards, an area of some sixty blocks west of Penn Station, “is all under development. The Brooklyn and Queens waterfronts are all under development.” Forty per cent of New York has been rezoned. “The way we think about the physical city has been completely overturned,” Doctoroff said. Bloomberg failed to win approval for a two-billion-dollar extension of the Javits Center, on the city’s West Side, but, later, a consortium made up mostly of private donors created the High Line, an eight-acre park just south of the center, built on abandoned elevated railroad tracks and stretching for thirty-one blocks.

To attract more high-tech jobs and secure New York’s status as a rival to California’s Silicon Valley, the Bloomberg administration started a bidding contest among several universities around the world to build an élite engineering-and-science campus, on Roosevelt Island, for two thousand graduate students. It will open next year, under Cornell’s auspices.

Bloomberg told me that he would like to be thought of as a mayor who set “a tone that the city can be well run and can invest in the future.” He cited the billions that he set aside when “the economy was great, and that carried us through the recession,” and he added, “Had we not done that we would have had to lay off an awful lot of people and cut back services.” By improving education and reducing crime and maintaining cultural institutions, he said, the city has become more attractive to the middle class, which “is not leaving the city and not pulling their kids out of public schools.” Department of Education figures show that since 2002 public-school enrollment in middle-income neighborhoods has risen.

By many measures, New York’s economy has improved under Bloomberg’s watch. Since the recession ended, in 2009, the number of private-sector jobs in the city has grown by nearly ten per cent, more than four per cent above the national average. Fifty million tourists, a record number, now visit annually, up from thirty-two million when Bloomberg entered office.

“Mike really does believe in what I call ‘the virtuous cycle’ of a successful city,” Doctoroff said. “And that is that at the end of the day when a city grows, as long as it grows wisely, it thrives. Growth is good, to echo Gordon Gekko’s ‘Greed is good.’ For a city, growth is good because what happens is that the incremental revenue is greater than the costs.”

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain used to grouse publicly about her successor, John Major. At a dinner party, a guest approached Thatcher and told her how much he missed her. “Well, I miss me, too,” she replied.

Bloomberg is having a hard time reconciling himself to the inevitability of a successor, especially since, as his closest advisers make plain, he believes that the current candidates lack stature, gravitas, and independence. There will be a November ballot, but the race will likely be decided weeks before that, on September 10th, in the Democratic primary, or, if no candidate wins more than forty per cent of the vote, in a runoff on October 1st. In New York City, a Republican candidate has only a slim chance of becoming mayor, as registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by about seven to one. Giuliani won two elections by promising to be tough on crime, and Bloomberg won three times by stressing the city’s need to rebound economically, first after 9/11 and then after the 2008 recession. With no equivalent torch issue in sight this year, Bloomberg’s successor most likely will be chosen by between five hundred thousand and seven hundred thousand voters, those who pick the winner of the Democratic primary—that is, by roughly ten per cent of the city’s five million eligible voters. In effect, Bloomberg’s strategist Kevin Sheekey told me, “For the first time in twenty-four years, New York City will not have a general election.”

There are six Democratic candidates who show up in the polls. Until recently, Christine Quinn, the forty-seven-year-old speaker of the City Council, led in many polls; she has the most visible public job, has worked closely with Bloomberg as speaker, and stands out as the only woman (and gay) contender in a primary where close to sixty per cent of the voters are expected to be female. Her challenge is to present her collaboration with Bloomberg—a potential liability in a Democratic primary—as evidence that she can get things done, without sounding like an entrenched incumbent.

The most professional campaign has been run by Bill de Blasio, the city’s public advocate, who was Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager during her first run for the U.S. Senate, in 2000. Although he has risen in the polls and has fervent liberal support, he lacks the collective backing of the unions, which are divided over the candidates. Bill Thompson, a former city comptroller, who is black, nearly beat Bloomberg in the 2009 mayoral race, winning more than seventy per cent of the black vote and fifty-five per cent of the Hispanic vote; Bloomberg spent a hundred and eight million dollars on the race, ten times as much as his challenger. Thompson has a reputation for being judicious, which sometimes comes across as a lack of passion.

John Liu, who is the city comptroller, from Queens, vies with de Blasio for the mantle of most liberal candidate, but he has been weakened by a government probe. Federal prosecutors recently convicted his former campaign treasurer and a fund-raiser for engaging in an illegal scheme to funnel money to Liu’s campaign, and in early August the city’s Campaign Finance Board found evidence of “serious” fund-raising violations; as a result, Liu was denied more than three million dollars in public matching funds for his campaign. Sal Albanese, a former city councilman, dwells in the basement of the polls, and was not invited to a recent televised debate. Anthony Weiner, the former congressman, has now twice asked voters to forgive him for sending out compromising pictures of himself; a recent Siena College poll found that eighty per cent of New Yorkers have an unfavorable opinion of him, the worst percentage in the poll’s history. None of the candidates is likely to garner the forty per cent of votes needed to avoid a runoff.

Bloomberg said that he knows whom he’d vote for in the general election, but declined to identify the candidate or say whether he will endorse him or her. “I can imagine anything,” he told me. “I have a great imagination.”

Bloomberg, according to one close adviser, is not likely to endorse Lhota, the leading Republican and the candidate whose positions are probably closest to his. The adviser recalled that, early in the campaign, Lhota described Bloomberg as “an idiot” for predicting that the Midtown Tunnel would open sooner than expected after Hurricane Sandy. “Leaving aside the fact that he once called the Mayor ‘an idiot,’ ” the adviser said, “and leaving aside the fact that he can’t win.” Another close adviser suggested that Bloomberg in fact could endorse Lhota. “It depends on who the Democrat is,” he said. In short, Bloomberg might endorse Lhota over a left-liberal Democrat, such as de Blasio or Liu.

Early on, the Mayor contemplated endorsing Quinn, calling her “a person of enormous integrity.” He has invited her to join him at press conferences and, at times, to fill in for him at public functions. Some of the Mayor’s friends are convinced that he made a back-room deal with Quinn in 2009, saying that he would endorse her in exchange for her support in amending the City Charter so that he could run a third time. (Both Bloomberg and Quinn have denied any quid pro quo.)

But the relationship between Bloomberg and Quinn is clearly uneasy. Late last year, Bloomberg encouraged several public figures, including Hillary Clinton and the real-estate developer and publisher Mortimer Zuckerman, to run for mayor; they declined. In early June, the Mayor, according to two Bloomberg advisers, was sympathetic to an effort by some of his supporters to draw Ray Kelly into the race. Bloomberg secretly financed a poll by his own longtime pollster, Douglas Schoen, to help convince Kelly that he could win, but Kelly declined.

With the approach of the primary, many aspects of Bloomberg’s legacy have come under fire. He has attributed the drop in crime, in part, to the “stop and frisk” policy he has implemented, which allows police officers to stop, question, and search citizens they consider suspicious. But the policy, which disproportionately targets minorities, has always been controversial. In late June, Quinn and the City Council, days after passing Bloomberg’s seventy-billion-dollar budget for the new fiscal year, claimed that the way the city used stop-and-frisk was unconstitutional. To restrain potential police abuses, they also passed two bills, over the Mayor’s strenuous objections: one establishes an independent inspector general, the other allows citizens the right to file racial-profiling lawsuits against police officers in state courts. Although Quinn brought both bills to the floor, she voted against the right-to-file-lawsuits bill. In late July, Thompson, speaking to a mostly black congregation, said that the policy had been abused, and that many of the six hundred thousand black and Hispanic citizens stopped by police in 2011 were “profiled as Trayvon [Martin] was profiled. If our government profiles people because of skin color and treats them as potential criminals, how can we expect citizens to do any less?”

Bloomberg declined to criticize Thompson directly. But, he told me, “I would suggest to the next mayor, whoever it is, that saving lives is the most important thing, more so than pandering. Stop-and-frisk has been shown to be—not the only, but the most effective, tool in getting guns out of the hands of kids.” The next mayor will need to find a different approach. On August 12th, in a hundred-and-ninety-five-page ruling in federal district court, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin ruled that the stop-and-frisk policy amounts to “indirect racial profiling” and violates the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. She ordered several remedies, including a federal monitor to oversee reforms and community meetings to gather comments from the public. At a press conference, an angry Bloomberg said that the judge had denied the city “a fair trial,” and promised to appeal.

His remarks on the subject of stop-and-frisk have sometimes come across as callous. Earlier this summer, on his weekly radio show, Bloomberg said, “I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.” An uproar ensued. When I spoke to Bloomberg, he conceded, “If I had a son who was stopped, I might feel differently about it, but nevertheless. Maybe I was inelegant, but I don’t think anybody thinks I am anything but—I hope not, anyway—supportive of trying to help all people. With my own money as well as time, thank you very much. I’ve spent twelve years of my life doing this.”

The business community is anxious about Bloomberg’s departure. “Bloomberg has his finger on the pulse of business and the economy,” Kathryn S. Wylde, the C.E.O. of the Partnership for New York City, the city’s major business organization, told me as we sat in her office, overlooking Battery Park. Wylde has worked with the organization since David Rockefeller and other business leaders created it, more than thirty years ago. When Washington attacked Wall Street, Bloomberg “stood up for the financial-services industry,” without any prodding from the business community, she said. “Most candidates come out of a local political environment, and there’s a large gap in their experiences and the reality that we are the world capital of business and finance.”

In April, the Partnership released a sixty-eight-page report, “NYC Jobs Blueprint,” which was developed, it says, “in the hope that the next Mayor and the next generation of city leaders” will learn what the city’s “job creators believe are the relevant lessons of the last decade.” The report describes Bloomberg in glowing terms. As “New York’s first ‘businessman mayor’ in more than a century,” he “was uniquely qualified to preside over the city’s successful transition to the New Millennium economy.” Crediting Bloomberg, it adds that the city’s “economy is growing at an annual rate of three per cent, outpacing that of the United States and most developed countries.” Contrary to the suggestion—made by the Democratic candidates for mayor, among others—that the four boroughs outside Manhattan are struggling, the Partnership report states that during Bloomberg’s three terms “job growth was greater outside Manhattan than within it,” with Brooklyn’s economy growing nearly three times as fast, and that of the Bronx twice as fast.

Bloomberg’s legacy is viewed somewhat differently by many less affluent voters. The “other New York,” as the Democratic candidates often call it, is not the city of Wall Street or Midtown or resurgent neighborhoods of Brooklyn, or the world of East Side salons where the élite call the Mayor “Mike” and, half-jokingly, ask him to be Mayor for Life. There are record numbers of homeless people, unemployment is high, and working- and middle-class incomes have stalled. On May 2nd, when the Mayor presented his budget for the coming year, he declared, “The city is doing well. All the statistics—crime and school performance and tourists, the number of jobs—all of these things are going in the right direction.” In a more than forty-minute presentation, he did not mention poverty.

Asked why, Bloomberg said, “No one has done more to help the poor than we have.” The city, he insisted, “created three hundred and fifty thousand jobs in tourism. These are entry-level jobs.” In his twelve years as mayor, it built “one hundred and sixty-five thousand units of affordable housing.” And by improving education the city addressed “one of the keys to getting out of poverty.” Yet a report issued by one of his own agencies, the Center for Economic Opportunity, revealed that by the end of 2011 more than a fifth of New Yorkers were living below the poverty line and another quarter just above it. These figures will rise, the report added, especially if federal spending declines, as expected.

This spring, the Fiscal Policy Institute, a progressive nonprofit research organization, issued an even grimmer report, concluding that there has been “no meaningful reduction in poverty” in the city in thirty years. A million seven hundred thousand city residents are poor, nearly a third of them children; the number of people on food stamps has risen by two-thirds since 2007. Fifty thousand residents, including twenty thousand children, are homeless.

Despite the rise in the number of the poor, “there has not been a significant increase in the number of city residents on public assistance,” James Parrott, the chief economist at the institute, said. He attributes this to a deliberately punitive Bloomberg policy that creates “an impenetrable application process, and if people manage to qualify they are soon knocked off and made to reapply.”

Since 2000, according to the Fiscal Policy Institute, the income disparity in the city has widened dramatically. After being adjusted for inflation, median family income and the income of poor families remained flat, but in the eight highest-income neighborhoods “real incomes rose 55 percent,” the report states. The wealthiest one per cent of city residents—those who make half a million dollars or more a year—earn thirty-nine per cent of all city income, up from just twelve per cent in 1980. Nationwide, the top one per cent earn twenty per cent of all income, up from ten per cent in 1980.

The mayoral candidates have been quick to emphasize the city’s income disparity, but, while suggesting that a city government can offer cures, they haven’t offered any comprehensive remedies. To repair a “social fabric that is stretched too far,” Bill de Blasio has said, for five years he would raise the city’s income tax on the top one per cent of earners from 3.9 to 4.3 per cent, generating just over half a billion dollars annually, to finance universal pre-kindergarten education and after-school programs. John Liu would raise the rate still further, to 5.5 per cent, generating up to a billion dollars. Weiner would raise the city’s income tax from 3.9 to 4.9 per cent—more than de Blasio’s proposal and less than Liu’s—for residents earning more than a million dollars a year, and would reduce taxes by ten per cent for those with an income of under a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Quinn is vague about potential tax increases. “I am absolutely not opposed to raising the income tax for upper-income individuals,” she told me, then quickly added that she was not committed either way. Thompson would not say anything specific on the subject.

It’s politically painless to suggest raising taxes on the top one per cent of earners, a tiny slice of the voting public. The Partnership emphasizes that New York City already has the steepest “tax burden” in the nation, and that its cost of living is one and a half times as great as the national average. It reports that the top one per cent of city taxpayers consists of just thirty-five thousand residents, and they already contribute forty-three per cent of the city’s income-tax revenues. Those earning more than a million dollars, who pay a state-income-tax surcharge and the city’s unincorporated business tax, “will see their combined effective marginal tax rate rise from 48% to 54% of earnings.” If New York City raises taxes, the Partnership predicts, wealthy residents will flee to states with no income tax. Liu argues that there is no evidence that wealth will flee. “I believe that every penthouse vacated gets filled,” he said. In 2008, after raising the city’s income tax, Bloomberg said, “Among my friends, I’ve never heard one person say ‘I’m going to move out of the city because of the taxes.’ Not one.” Today, Bloomberg says the opposite, referring to such a tax hike as “about as dumb a policy as I can think of.” (Asked to explain the contradiction, a spokesperson said that what Bloomberg meant in 2008 was that no one “among his friends” would move.)

Most of the Democratic mayoral candidates describe Bloomberg as an élitist. “I don’t know whether I’d term it arrogance,” Thompson said. “The Mayor doesn’t listen.” A July poll by the Times and Siena College suggested that voters view him as distant. Although he still enjoyed enviably high job-approval ratings, a clear majority of New Yorkers said that “empathy” was the trait they most desired in a new mayor. Last week’s Times poll offered a more upbeat assessment of Bloomberg’s empathy quotient: fifty-five per cent of respondents said that Bloomberg “cares ‘some’ or ‘a lot’ about the needs and problems of people like themselves.” When I asked Bloomberg about his bedside manner, he questioned the July poll’s methodology and rejected its conclusion. “Look, in the end, if you want to know what people really think, they vote with their feet,” he said. “For the first time, more people are coming into the city than leaving the city.”

By their nature, New York’s mayoral primaries do not speak to the city as a whole; in place of a cogent vision for addressing its troubles, candidates are encouraged to compete for the narrow favor of one interest group or another. Pandering is the sport of the season. The Democratic candidates speak of the services they will add—more police, more subsidized housing, more preschool education, more assistance for the homeless, more support for city workers. For months now, they have attended almost daily mayoral forums sponsored by various groups, each with its checklist. Rarely are they asked how they will pay for their promises or balance the budget.

One evening in May, several of the candidates attended the Animal Rights Mayoral Forum, sponsored by NYCLASS, an organization that, in the words of its executive director, Allie Feldman, is seeking to support “a mayor who has compassion for all New Yorkers, two-legged and four-legged.” The candidates sat stiffly behind a metal table fielding questions about their devotion to animals. Would you require pet stores to sell only pets from animal shelters? Would you, for humane reasons, champion vegetarianism in public schools? Would you ban horse-drawn carriages, which are cruel to horses? Thompson professed his love for his two “rescue cats”; de Blasio boasted that his two children were vegetarians. When Albanese said that he supported a law requiring buildings to allow senior citizens to own pets but would make an exception if the pets were “dangerous animals,” Liu saw an opening. “I don’t think dogs are dangerous,” he declared.

Bloomberg has tried to stay out of the fray, but sometimes he has been unable to resist. After one mayoral forum, he described the encounter as “depressing.” He added, “No one had any creative ideas other than they wanted apple pie and ice cream and not have anybody pay for it.”

But, with the next mayor almost certain to be a Democrat, and with forum sponsors pressing for support for their agendas, the candidates feel little compulsion to look beyond the primary and also appeal to independent and Republican voters, as Bloomberg needed to do to get elected. As a consequence, none of the Democratic candidates have addressed the one issue vital to the city’s future: the budget. Although the budget has been admirably balanced for the past decade, in the next few years New York may confront its most severe budget crisis since the nineteen-seventies.

According to the Citizens Budget Commission, the Mayor’s seventy-billion-dollar budget for 2014 “was balanced with a heavy reliance on non-recurring resources” totalling $2.7 billion. Into each budget from 2009 to 2014, Bloomberg diverted more than three billion surplus dollars that his administration and the City Council had set aside earlier to help cover unfunded health benefits for retired city employees, which now total about ninety billion dollars. He used those surpluses to balance the budgets. This temporary fix, among others, the commission concluded, “masks” a structural deficit that will reveal itself in the new mayor’s first budget, in July of next year. The commission described the predicament the mayor will confront as “the calm before the storm.”

Bloomberg’s last budget also contains some daunting costs, left for the next mayor to resolve. Pensions and other benefits add an average seventy-two per cent to most city employees’ salaries; in the case of policemen and firemen, the expense of these benefits exceeds the workers’ pay. Currently, ninety-five per cent of city workers pay nothing for full health coverage for themselves and their families, even after they retire. Health-insurance premiums for those workers cost taxpayers $6.3 billion—nearly double the 2002 cost. Under the new federal health-care legislation, the so-called “Cadillac” health plans that city employees enjoy could qualify for a steep excise tax, Mark Page, the budget director, has said. In next year’s budget, the cost of pensions and other benefits will exceed twenty-three billion dollars, more than the city spends to deliver all municipal services, including police, fire, sanitation, welfare, and education.

Meanwhile, the city’s three hundred thousand employees are working without contracts; many have been doing so since 2009. Bloomberg has made no provision in next year’s budget for retroactive pay increases. He says the city cannot afford it: granting all workers a retroactive pay increase of four per cent annually, the same increase they received in their last contract, would cost nearly eight billion dollars. Raising taxes strictly on the top one per cent of earners would not make a dent in the budget shortfall.

Bloomberg also disputes the idea that city workers haven’t received pay increases, since pay hikes are built into labor contracts in the form of longevity pay and other automatic increases. “The teachers, who say that they haven’t had a contract in years, go up an average of three per cent a year,” he said. “I don’t know anyone in the private sector who goes up three per cent every year.” For new labor contracts, Bloomberg has proposed giving workers small raises, of one and one-quarter per cent—if they agree to pay a percentage of their health-care premiums, on a par with most state, federal, and private employees.

The unions and the Democratic candidates blame Bloomberg for refusing to negotiate; the Mayor blames the recession. “The unions don’t want to settle with him,” Carol Kellermann, the president of the Citizens Budget Commission and a former top aide to Senator Chuck Schumer, said; they want to negotiate with a Democratic mayor. It’s possible that, alone onstage, the winning mayoral candidate will grow to meet the demands of the office and to resist the city’s many factions, as Ed Koch did. For now, the candidates look small.

Joel Klein, the former schools chancellor, frets, “My biggest worry is that the next mayor will revert to the politics of the past, and the interests of unions and the special interests will dominate.” He says, “Because Mike doesn’t need the job, he was able to do the tough stuff.” For his part, Bloomberg denies having solved short-term budget fixes by imposing long-term problems. “The next mayor is going to inherit from us a government that has been well run and fiscally responsible, and doesn’t have any buried things,” he told me. Nonetheless, the city’s future finances will be a challenge. “Through no fault of Bloomberg’s, the city is in a dangerous fiscal situation,” Giuliani told me. “The next mayor has to be a fiscal expert, the way I was an expert on crime.”

Richard Ravitch, a former lieutenant governor and a former chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, was among the city and state leaders who worked together in the nineteen-seventies to rescue the city from bankruptcy. He told me that in order for the city to avoid another fiscal crisis taxes will have to go up for individual citizens, and he dismissed the idea that wealth would flee the city.

“I think that the people who make location decisions based on tax rates have already essentially left New York, or have made sure they’re only here the requisite minimum number of days so they don’t have to pay taxes,” he said. He noted that taxes were once much steeper: “When I was a young businessman, the marginal tax rate was over eighty per cent. It didn’t diminish my greed one iota.” Taxes have always been “higher in New York than in most places, but if that were the determinant of people’s location decisions how could New York be thriving the way it is?”

Ravitch believes that “the central domestic issue” in the city, as in the nation, is how much the government reduces budgets and how much it increases revenue. You can’t raise revenue, he said, “without persuading the public that you’ve cut city expenditures sufficiently.” First, “we need the kind of political leadership that’s going to tell the public the truth.”

When I pressed the Democratic candidates, they acknowledged a potential budget crisis and blamed Bloomberg for deferring difficult decisions. But few indicated which constituents they would disappoint in the effort to shore up the budget. De Blasio, asked if he would require city workers to pay part of their health-care premiums, replied, “Everything is on the table,” but he didn’t get specific. In dealing with the unions, he said, “you can’t piss on them. You can’t make them political punching bags à la Bloomberg and Chris Christie.”

Liu, when asked the same question, kept the focus on Bloomberg: “This is the mathematical genius New York had to have for a third term? He left us in the red!” Quinn and Thompson were equally evasive, saying that they would not conduct labor negotiations in the press. Weiner was somewhat more forthright. “We have to say to city employees—and this is something I know some of them will not like to hear—that city employees and retirees will have to pay a little bit more for their health care.” He wants them to contribute ten per cent. Lhota echoed Bloomberg’s position on retroactive pay raises: “A lot of people in the private sector also did not get raises but continued to do their jobs. We went through a period of contraction.”

Bloomberg, despite his many battles with municipal unions, expressed respect for city employees, and conceded that there are limits to mayoral power. “The conservative columnists write, ‘Oh, you should just tell the unions to go fuck themselves!’ ” he told me. “You can’t do that. You have to keep delivering services.” He added, “One of the things that surprised me was just how good the municipal workforce is.” It nevertheless rankles him that the state constitution includes a provision stating that, once a benefit, like a pension, is awarded to workers by the state legislature, “even the legislature can’t take it away.”

Bloomberg has little patience for politicians, and even less for the current crop of mayoral candidates, who, besides failing to speak out on retroactive pay and bloated pension and health benefits, take positions that, he said, would “let the teachers’ union run the education system.” He blames the press, too: “I’ve always defended the press. It is very democratic. It gives the public what they want, so if you’re giving them sensationalism and crime and that sort of thing, it’s because that’s what sells inches and minutes. But I would also argue that the Fourth Estate has an obligation to do more, and that it doesn’t do its job nearly as well as it should. It should be demanding that the candidates address the issues, and when they don’t—when they obfuscate or duck the question—come back again, and again, and again, until you get an answer. Instead, they want to know, ‘What do you think about the latest scandal?’ ”

The shift toward instantaneous, digital media doesn’t help, he added. “Modern technology is making it very difficult to govern,” he said. “This is going to be one of the big problems down the road. Traditionally, we’ve elected somebody to a term and they have that term to do things and then explain why it’s the right thing to do, and to prove it’s the right thing to do before they have to face the voters again. We’re going into a world where there’s an instant referendum on everything before it even starts. And I think that’s going to change how decisions are made in government for the worse.” He worries that future mayors will do little more than placate as they are besieged by opinions from e-mails, bloggers, and social Web sites.

Perhaps this helps explain Bloomberg’s rumored interest in buying a newspaper like the Times. Bloomberg can be prickly with and about the press, especially the Times. Its editorial page supported his controversial third term, describing him as “a first-rate steady hand during unsteady times,” and its news pages regularly run stories about his achievements and his philanthropy. But Bloomberg believes that he is often treated unfairly by the paper, and that the editors permit a liberal, anti-business bias to bleed into news stories about Wall Street “moguls” and describe tax breaks to induce business to invest in New York as a form of bribery.

Yet friends say that he would love to own the Times, as a platform to delve into issues, to endorse and denounce candidates, and to champion his causes. When I asked him about it, Bloomberg waved his hand. “I don’t know how to answer,” he said. “I think you’d see lots of people wanting to buy it. It’s a very prestigious paper.” Buying it would be a challenge, as the paper’s owners, the Sulzberger family, show no sign of wanting to sell. Two weeks ago, after Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, unexpectedly bought the Washington Post, for two hundred and fifty million dollars, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher and chairman of the Times, felt the need to issue a statement: “Will our family seek to sell the Times? The answer to that is no. The Times is not for sale.”

Another media property that Bloomberg has been said for years to covet is the Financial Times, which is owned by Pearson P.L.C., a British company. The F.T. would add lustre and reach to Bloomberg’s company. Earlier this summer, Bloomberg attended a reception honoring the paper’s hundred-and-twenty-fifth anniversary. “People are always telling me I should buy the F.T.,” he told the crowd. He paused, looking around the room with a sly smile. “I buy it every day.” It was a well-rehearsed line that he’d gone over the day before with Doctoroff. Later, Bloomberg told me, “As far as I know, the F.T. is not for sale.” But, he added, “if they called and said, ‘Look at it. Would you look at it?’ I suppose.” A Bloomberg adviser said that because of the obvious common ground between the business publication and Bloomberg L.P., and because he believes that Pearson is prepared to sell the newspaper, “I think it will happen.” A ranking official at the F.T. disagreed: “It’s not going to be sold. They don’t want to sell. Bloomberg wants to be asked.” The invitation will not be forthcoming, he added.

Whatever he does next, Bloomberg said, when he looks back on his three terms as mayor he is content to know that he defied special interests. “Yes, it’s nice to have everybody love you,” he said. “And, yes, I don’t like the question ‘Why is your polling down?’ But the truth of the matter is that if fifty to sixty per cent of the people still think you’re doing a good job after twelve years in office—that’s pretty good. It’s like skiing. If you tell me you don’t fall, you’re not skiing the double black diamonds.” According to the clock on his wall, a hundred and fifty-three days remained of his administration. He said, “It would be a great waste—and I would not like to look back and think I didn’t do everything I thought I could do to leave this city as good as it could be.” ♦

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